CASTING CON AIR was nuts. Rosenberg was
friends with Steve Buscemi and wrote mass-
murderer Garland Greene for him. Even so,
the script got around and Rosenberg received a
package in the mail. “I opened it and it was a baby
doll’s arm covered in blood,” he recalls. “And
there was a note with it saying, ‘I am Garland
Greene.’ It was from Denis Leary. He really, really
wanted that part.” Rosenberg wouldn’t waver.
For US Marshal Vince Larkin, they wanted
John Cusack, who didn’t care for the script, but
figured that starring in a blockbuster would give
him increased industry leverage. It also paid
substantially. Cusack had one demand. To bring
something of himself to Larkin, says Rosenberg,
he insisted on wearing idiosyncratic footwear.
“He was like, ‘I wanna create the very first action
hero who wears Birkenstocks. Charlton Heston
wore sandals and he kicked ass. I wanna do the
same.’ Thus, Larkin wears sandals.”
Last to be cast was the film’s chief evildoer,
big-brained Cyrus The Virus. Bruckheimer
approached Bruce Willis, but he turned it down.
John Malkovich was an early idea, but
Bruckheimer asked West to audition a host of big
names. Tom Sizemore read for it, as did Willem
Dafoe, who gave a very sinister audition. And then
came someone who was too close to the bone.
“Mickey Rourke was a particularly
harrowing audition,” shudders West. “He was
doing a confrontational scene and there was this
young assistant casting director reading the Poe
part opposite him. Mickey Rourke was eyeball to
eyeball, nose to nose with him, and then pulls
out this 10” Bowie knife from behind him, which
was totally real and incredibly sharp. And he
held it under this poor guy’s chin. And me and
the casting directors froze — do we intervene, do
we wrestle him to the ground? Is this great acting,
or has he lost the plot and is going to kill us all?
I’m ashamed to say we did not intervene. We let
him finish the scene. So it was a pretty powerful
audition, that one.” Even now he sounds relieved.
Finally, Bruckheimer asked West to choose.
West said he still wanted Malkovich, and they cast
him without an audition. “So Malkovich flew in
from France two days before the shoot,” says West,
“and we squeezed him into his orange jumpsuit.”
Cage arrived, ready to go, with — inspired
by Rosenberg’s talk of Poe being cut from the
same cloth as Ronnie Van Zant and Gregg
Allman — a full, thick beard. “We can’t have him
look like that,” said Bruckheimer. “Jerry’s
thinking was, ‘You don’t pay a guy $20 million
and then cover up his face,’” says Rosenberg, who
loved the beard, but because Bruckheimer saw it
as his fault, was instructed to tell Cage to shave.
Rosenberg skulked off to Cage’s trailer. A
crestfallen Cage acquiesced, and as his make-up
lady shaved him, his face dropped. “I’ve lost
Cameron Poe,” he said. “I could see him leave the
character,” says Rosenberg. “For him, the beard
was part of it. He looked momentarily lost. But
he got Poe back.” As a compromise, Cage kept
a five o’clock shadow, and insisted on having his
long hair flow; Bruckheimer had wanted it in
a pony-tail. “Nic loved that long hair so much,”
says Garner. “So, the scene near the beginning
when he comes off the prison bus and hits the
wind and it’s like a Fabergé commercial? That
was Nic’s moment for his hair to shine, literally.”FILMING BEGAN ON 1 July ’96, with Salt
Lake City International Airport doubling for
Con Air’s base. Cage was fully invested, totally
prepared and rarely went beyond three takes.
Malkovich, on the other hand, “appeared not to
have read the script,” West says, and just asked the
director each time what he wanted him to dobefore coming up with hilarious, expletive-strewn
improvisations. Cusack, while great, didn’t hide
his disdain for the film. For Rosenberg, it was
disheartening. “It was kind of a bummer. He
thought he was selling out.”
Then came madness. For eight weeks, for the
shooting of the siege in Lerner Airfield, they all
lived and worked in Wendover, a 2.5km-long strip
of nothingness on the Nevada/Utah border, chosen
by West because he thought it looked like the
moon. The 400-strong cast and crew there counted
just two women. Some supporting actors playing
minor roles had done time, as had a few of the
crew. And it was hot: temperatures hit 48 degrees.From storyboard to
screen: DEA agent
Malloy’s Corvette goes
for an impromptu ride in
one of the film’s many
spectacular stunts.Cyrus The Virus and Dave
Chapelle’s Pinball Parker.
Below: Poe with wife Tricia
(Monica Potter) and Casey
(Landry Allbright), the daughter
he’s never met.